Abstract
Temporality represents the most important and difficult question of phenomenology: decisive for its idea of phenomenon and consciousness. What means that time is the appearing itself, so not a time of consciousness but the consciousness itself: this is the phenomenological question about the origin of time. Composed in three decades approximately—from 1904 to 1934—Husserlian contributions phenomenology of temporality constitutes the most extensive corpus about this matter in the canon of occidental philosophy. They lead in three main directions and correspond to the same number of periods of their development: (a) the mathesis of intentional manifolds (1904–1911), the metaphysics of individuality (1917–1918), the theory of temporal self-constitution (1929–1934). After the description of the phases, the sources and the internal articulations, the paper makes room for a brief and essential glossary of phenomenology of temporality, made up of some of the most considerable and aporetic notions: the retention, and its bond with protention, individuality and its elusive essence, the flow and the stream. Lastly, the paper inspects and examines some of the most remarkable critics to phenomenology of temporality, from Heidegger to Derrida, from Bergmann to Lévinas, in order to demonstrate how leading was its role in the whole philosophy of the twentieth century.
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Notes
- 1.
Showing the stylistic and conceptual deformity of the original text prepared by Edith Stein, drawing from materials of very different times and sometimes forcedly homogenizing them, the originals of which, moreover, were lost, Boehm's edition was further emended by Bernet (1985), regarding the dating of some texts included in part B of Hua X, and recomposed in four groups: the first (Tx. n. 1-17) dating back to 1893–1901, the second (Tx. n. 18-35) to 1904–1905, the third (Tx. n. 39-47 and 51-52) to the period between the winter semester 1906/07 and the end of August 1909, and the fourth (Tx. n. 48-50 and 53-54) to 1909–1911. Therefore the re-dating regards the texts n. 18 (from 1901 to 1904), 48-50 (from 1908 to 1909) an 36-38 (from 1909 to 1917). Particularly relevant is the postdating of these last three texts that constitute the second part of the Seefeld Manuscripts (Bernet 1985: XXXV; Husserl 1985: 283 ff.)– following the Tx. n. 35, dated already by Boehm to 1905, according to a title given by Husserl himself “Seefeld manuscripts and older manuscripts on individuation. Seefeld 1905. Individuation” (Husserl 1928: 244)—since they would prove contemporary to BM, with regard to which they exhibit also a clear theoretical coherency, represented by the topic of temporal individuality.
- 2.
Letter of Husserl to Heidegger of 03/28/1918, in Hua, Dokumenten, III, IV, p. 130; see Bernet, R.-Lohmar, D., Einleitung in (Husserl 2001), p. XXII.
- 3.
- 4.
Derrida speaks of phenomenological archeo-teleology (1972: 60).
- 5.
On the influence exercised in the 1930 s by the Husserlian readings of the works of Lévy-Bruhl, see in particular the letter of March 11, 1935 (Briefwechsel, Dokumente, Hua, III, 7, hrsg. von K. und E. Schuhmann, pp. 161–164), tr. in Husserl (2008). On the notion of primitive/archaic/primordial—so central in the comparison between the two authors—see the rectifications of Lévy-Bruhl himself (1949).
- 6.
See in this regard the letter of Heidegger to Karl Jaspers of December 26, 1926 (Heidegger and Jaspers 1990: 71), in which he recalls the occasion of the consignment, in the previous April, of the first version of Sein un Zeit and Husserl’s contextual request for his “student” to curate the edition of the manuscripts on time. Still in 1968, in a retrospective gaze on the Comprehension of time in the phenomenology and thought of the ontological question, Heidegger, recalling that episode, laid claim to his decision to edit the research of the master only after his work had been given to the publisher, since they seemed to remain within the traditional concept of time, not asking how presence (Anwesenheit), the present, would show a characteristic of time, nor how precisely from time the sense of being would draw its determination. The Heideggerian question instead “was determined by the ontological question. It headed in a direction that would always remain extraneous to the Husserlian research into the internal consciousness of time” (Heidegger 2007: 148). Beyond the terminological and conceptual debts—from Gegenwärtigung to Gewesenheit, from Erwärtigung to Zeitigung—and from the attested Heideggerian knowledge of BM, as for that matter is declared in the Vorbemerkung des Herausgebers of 1928—in which there emerges the nexus between protension and retention and, what is more, the precedence of the former over the latter, which instead had long been considered as the main watershed among the analyses of the two authors—there remains intact the problem of the most profound philosophical tension of the twentieth century that cannot be listed under the title of incomprehension nor reconstructed as a mere biographical matter, or even less as a historical–political one.
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Masi, F. (2016). Concepts of Time in Husserl. In: Santoianni, F. (eds) The Concept of Time in Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24895-0_7
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